CrowdStrike Raises $30 Million For Security Intelligence, Analytics

CrowdStrike, an emerging security firm gaining widespread attention for advocating offensive and defensive security tactics, has raised an additional $30 million in Series B financing.

The company said it will use the financing to further develop big data analytics and security intelligence capabilities. It said it also plans to bolster its marketing strategy. The financing round was led by Accel Partners and included founding investor Warburg Pincus. Sameer Gandhi, Partner, Accel Partners, will join the board of directors.

The company unveiled its threat protection platform called Falcon in June. It uses global threat intelligence feeds and other threat data for realtime detection, attribution and response measures. In previous interviews, company executives had told CRN that the goal of the approach is to raise the cost and risk for cybercriminals attempting to carry out attacks. In addition to honeypots, the company has a threat intelligence team that actively tracks and infiltrates dozens of threat actors.

In addition to threat detection and intelligence capabilities, the platform provides DNS security and email protection to safeguard against spearphishing attacks, a common way for state-sponsored attackers to initially gain access to the corporate systems they are targeting. The company also sells incident response, penetration testing and threat assessment services.

The company was co-founded by McAfee executives George Kurtz, former founder and CEO of Foundstone, who served as global chief technology officer at McAfee, and who is now CrowdStrike CEO, and Dmitri Alperovitch, who gained attention for leading the McAfee team responsible for investigating the Google Aurora attacks in 2009. Alperovitch is the company's chief technology officer.

The total investment in CrowdStrike is at $56 million. Last year, the company raised $26 million Series A investment from Warburg Pincus, where Kurtz served as executive-in-residence.

In its report on big data security, Enterprise Strategy Group said CrowdStrike is mostly sold in the public sector. The firm's competitors include other vendors that use analytics as part of "active defense" measures, including Cognitive Security, which was acquired by Cisco Systems, HBGary, now part of ManTech International, and SAIC, which combines security analytics with services.

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